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Here
is a paragraph about Canadian history, written by somebody else, every word of
which I agree with:
It is impossible to disentangle the making of the
Canadian state from the history of European – and particularly French and
British – imperialism and colonialism. In acts of incredible hubris and
chauvinism, the territories of the Americas were claimed by Europeans –
mediated by the great European churches – and pillaged, conquered, and divided,
with the Indigenous peoples subjected to genocide, enslavement, subordination
and marginalization. In the consolidation of the space of the contemporary
Canadian state, that came with Confederation on July 1, 1867 and the subsequent
nation-building project of the National Policy, the decisive act(s) was the
suppression of the First Nations peoples of Canada.
This was written, this week, by an anonymous
author of the Socialist Project, an
online source that over the years has
contributed a lot of sense to the political discourse in Canada, and I
admit I was thinking along the same lines as the above-quoted author as I
watched the fatuous celebration of Canada Day yesterday on Parliament Hill. It
was impossible to believe that any of the speakers extolling the diversity of this
great country could actually have believed a word they said, certainly not if
any of them had made even a cursory study of Canadian history.
I had a general impression that the celebration
was not so much of Canada, as of Canadian women. Some of the speakers betrayed
a faint note of hysteria: which I guess was understandable, since they were
confronted by the need to emit a string of meaningless clichés, never an easy
task at the best of times. I was surprised to discover that one of the most
eager cliché-mongers was the wife of the Prime Minister, who, when he was
dredged up by televisual link from Leamington, Ontario, which he described as
Canada’s tomato capital, outdid them all in clichés. He gave us a full-bore
Happy Times exegsis. He should try it on the Trump.
As an aside I could observe that the mention of
Canadian tomato-growers reminded me of an NFB film I worked on in 1975 in which
a Canadian farmer complained bitterly to a minister in the Liberal government
of our present Prime Minister’s father, that their permission for American
tomatoes to enter the Canadian market was making it virtually impossible for
him, on his Canadian farm, to make a
living. The minister acknowledged their
problem, but his advice was, “Don’t hold your breath,” in the hope of any
relief. Later in the interview he coolly admitted that anyone with any money to
invest would be better to put it into Canada Savings Bonds than into a farm. No
work; no trouble, and a better financial return. With leadership like that, is it any wonder
we are now serving as hand-maidens to the powerful American capitalists?
As it happens, for the last few weeks, as I
have been observing the apparent
collapse of decency and imagination in the politics of North America, I have
been ruminating along the same lines as our above-quoted author, hoping that I might have an opportunity
to recall to people’s minds that the
so-called rule of law of which we boast so frequently, is, after all, based on the ignorance, arrogance and
implacable greed of the colonists who came here from Europe, intent on taking
over the land from its occupiers, whose existence, in the strictly formal
sense, they denied from the get-go,
using the imaginary legal concept of terra
nullius to argue that the land was empty of people, and therefore ripe for
their plucking, a concept enthusiastically backed by the European religious
authorities, who regarded the colonists as God’s warriors.
My above-quoted anonymous writer added that in
setting up the Canadian state, the first thing was to seize the land from the
Aboriginal peoples:
The intent
of the Canadian state and emerging capitalist ruling classes was quite explicit
– appropriation of the Aboriginal lands, extinguishment of Aboriginal title
(actually written into the Manitoba Act, and found, in assorted ways in the
various treaties), marginalization of the First Nations to tiny and divided
reserve territories, and settlement and commodification of the dispossessed
lands by Europeans to build Canadian capitalism as an extension of the European
political-economic space.
Of
course, one could hardly expect that all those experts bloviating on Parliament
Hill on Sunday in their desperate attempt to whip up Canadian nationalism would
actually have any idea of the foundations of Canada as a nation. In fact, we
didn’t get off to too bad a start when George III signed the Royal Proclamation
by which the French-English battle for North America was concluded. In there he
undertook that Indian land should not be settled or developed without the
agreement of the “several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom we are
connected, and who live under our Protection,” and that such agreement could be
arranged only “at some Publick meeting or Assembly” of the Indians with the
colonial authorities, and that no private persons should be permitted to buy
Indian lands. This was a measure designed, says the Proclamation, to avoid
repetition of “the great frauds and abuses” that had already occurred in the
purchasing of Indian lands.
The problem came with the application
of this noble ideal. Many treaties were signed, it is true, mostly covering the
best agricultural lands across southern Ontario, where various native tribes
accepted to surrender their rights to millions of acres of land for derisory
sums. .The Indians (I am using the term, no longer in much use, but the one by
which the indigenous people were normally described throughout these fateful
years), never initiated these treaties,
and did not much influence their terms.
Once they had alienated their title, it was simply assumed they would simply
retreat from the advancing settlement by Europeans into more remote hunting
territories. The pattern henceforth, right up to the present day, has been that
such treaties were and still are negotiated, only when the land on which the
Indians are living has become useful for European settlement.
The view taken of the Indians by the
colonial authorities was a contemptuous one, used by the
Colonial Secretary in 1830 when he said that they were “in a state of
barbarism”, and that efforts made to provide them with the “industrious and
peaceful habits of civilized life” had failed.
Therefore he believed they should be gathered together in one place, so as
to be out of the way of the industrious settlers, in some preferably remote place where they could be encouraged in
religious knowledge and education.
When the infamous residential schools
were established some decades later, they were actually established in the
written intention to detach Indian children from the barbarous lives of their
parents. When one thinks for a moment about this purpose, its cruel inhumanity,
its assumption of infinite superiority by Us over Them, one cannot surely be anything
but convinced that the framers of such purposes were both arrogant and ignorant.
The laws they began to write through the 1820s to the 1870s, when they were
cohered into the Indian Act that is still to this day the instrument of control
over the First Nations, were and are redolent with this sense of superiority. The Indian Act purported to, and actually did,
exert control over every aspect of Indian life, even including such things as
who could be, and who could not be, regarded as an Indian. This was taken so far at one time that any Indian
who passed through a university with a degree was automatically stricken from
the rolls, and no longer regarded as an Indian.
This is a diabolical system, with twists and turns that
are scarcely believable, such as the disbarring from Indian status of any woman
who marries outside her race, and the acceptance into full status of any white
woman who might have married a status Indian man. This particular idiocy is being slowly
corrected, bit by bit, but the process towards its full abolition is slow and tortured.
I have to add one thing more: an
admirable, persistent, unquenchable resistance to the future laid out for them
by the Euro-Canadian lawmakers, should be one of the glorious chapters of
Canadian history, if only it were known more widely. I have travelled widely across the country to
many indigenous communities, and I know the story has been the same everywhere;
deprived for many generations of an equal education --- still the same thing
today, in fact --- they nevertheless threw up their own leaders who stuck to
their guns against government schemes designed, ultimately, to abolish them as
a race of people.
Unfortunately, this is a history ---
and the full story, in all its glory, is fifty times worse than I have
described --- about which most Canadians have a very hazy notion, if that. And
it is one which would give me serious pause before standing on Parliament Hill
to extol the virtues of our law-abiding society.
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